IIRC when Tramiel bought Atari their vision was all about the 16/32 bit computers but did quite a few things to bring in cash based on the existing Atari designs - and chips. That's the Atari 65 and 130XE too just being rehashes of older 8 bit Bushnell computers.

I'm all Tramiel-Atari era myself so never even reflected on the 8 bit re-releases though so I might be misremembering something.